


The Man IN Time

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-27
Packaged: 2018-01-17 06:09:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1376695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What was supposed to be a quick sketch to bring Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes into the modern era turned into a 2000 word bullet-pointed opus. (Try to look surprised.) </p><p> </p><p>  <i>Steven Grant Rogers, born in 1983 to Joseph and Sarah Rogers in Brooklyn, NY. Joe is a postman, having been medically retired from the Army, Sarah is a nurse....</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man IN Time

* Steven Grant Rogers, born in 1983 to Joseph and Sarah Rogers in Brooklyn, NY. Joe is a postman, having been medically retired from the Army, Sarah is a nurse. Joe dies when Steve is a boy, Sarah is a working single mother and is happy to send Steve over to the Fort Hamilton USO after school to keep him out of trouble and have him be around other youngsters — and soak up a little of the military culture and masculine influence that a fatherless boy could use. They lead a lower-middle-class life, Sarah being clever and resourceful and having more options than she would have in the 1920s. Steve’s got his asthma, but he’s got proper medication for it and his mother has him swimming because it’s supposed to be good for his lungs, so while he’s skinny, he’s not quite as frail as he might have been. 

* It’s at the USO where Steve meets James Buchanan Barnes, born 1982 in Indiana but living in Brooklyn where his father George is stationed at Ft. Hamilton, having switched to an MOS that allows him to be home at night and be a single parent to Bucky and Rebecca. Bucky and Steve become BuckyandSteve (with occasionally parentally-required BuckyandSteveandRebecca) for the usual reasons. 

* George Barnes is killed during a training accident one weekend on drill, a freak thing, in 1997. Sarah Rogers gets temporary custody of Bucky and Rebecca because she’s listed on George’s official childcare plan with the Army — the kids stay with her when he’s on drill — but George’s brother-in-law (Bucky and Rebecca’s mother’s brother) offers to take the children on a more permanent basis. Bucky has absolutely no desire to live in Nebraska, but Rebecca was struggling before her father’s death and even with the extra money from the Army, three kids in a two-bedroom apartment is a lot for a single working mother. The agreed-upon solution is that Bucky stays for the balance of the school year, Rebecca goes out immediately, and Steve will spend part of the summer out there. 

* Steve is in Nebraska when Sarah notices a lump on her breast. She’s a nurse, she knows what to do, but it’s still too late. She passes away from cancer in 1999 and Steve joins Bucky and Rebecca in Nebraska until he graduates high school. Bucky’s been out of school for a year by that point and worked on the farm rather than hightail it out of town and leave Steve alone out there. The two of them move back to NYC, Steve to Cooper Union and Bucky to a construction apprenticeship found through a friend of his father’s, in the summer of 2001. 

* On 11 September, neither of them know what has become of the other — Steve should have been on a subway that goes under the Towers, Bucky was at the union offices a few blocks away filling out forms — until Bucky gets home in the middle of the night, covered in dust because he’d been drafted to help dig for survivors, to find Steve sitting outside along with everyone else who is waiting for someone to come home that maybe never will. 

* Bucky signs his enlistment papers in February 2002; Steve tried to enlist as well, but he can’t get a medical waiver. Bucky’s done with AIT in the fall and gets on a plane for Kuwait to join the incipient invasion of Iraq in February 2003. By 2005, he’s Airborne qualified and through Ranger School and is thinking of applying for Special Forces, which will require re-enlisting but he’s more or less okay with that — his original reasons for enlisting are gone, but he can’t really see himself moving back to Brooklyn and restarting his apprenticeship, either. Steve doesn’t need looking-after anymore and Rebecca’s getting married, so he takes the plunge and goes to Q-School. 

* Steve’s life in Brooklyn is normal to a degree that distresses him. He goes to class, does his homework, takes on whatever freelance projects he can get, goes to his internship, and figures out how to live on his own for the first time in his life. He volunteers at the Brooklyn VA and paints a few 9/11-themed murals, but that’s as close as he gets to what is both a very personal and a very distant war. He gets his BFA in 2005 and manages to leverage one of his internships into a job in a graphic design department at Conde Nast. 

* A pharmaceutical company is doing a study on a new asthma medication and Steve fits the profile, so he joins up because they’ll pay for his drugs — his new insurance has high co-pays. The drug has a weird reaction with Steve’s system (handwavy science) and he’s hospitalized and given massive amounts of steroids and other stuff and the end result is, more or less, Captain America — not the body from the first movie but maybe the second, a constitution now capable of building that body through hard work, which Steve needs to put in as part of his recovery and rehab. 

* It’s 2006 and the Surge in Iraq, which began with massive US (and Iraqi) casualties and Steve, still moved by that and by the fact that Bucky is out there somewhere, unable to tell him where he is or when he’ll be back or what’s going on in his life at all. Bucky never even knew Steve had gotten sick. Steve enlists again, this time for OCS, and gets in. 

* Steve has made it up to 1LT and is in Afghanistan in early 2008; his platoon patrols and interacts with a group of compounds (it’s not a town) that isn’t overtly hostile, but they’re not terribly helpful, either, which is about all he can ask for. He goes to shuras with the elders, his men play with the kids, and he tries to convince all of the heads of households to let the touring doctors and dentists see their families and maybe consider sending their daughters to school. Their region is criminally short of Female Engagement Teams, so they wind up with a British lady, Peggy Carter, who wears the rank of Captain but Steve’s platoon sergeant is pretty sure she’s actually a spook. Peggy meets with the wives and girl children, once in a while shepherding a lady doctor (or a lady-doctor) but usually bringing books and candies and toothbrushes and dolls. She and Steve coordinate what they’re telling the women and men, trying to get the locals to trust them enough to tell them about all of the bad guys hiding in the hills around their valley. 

It never seems like they make progress — the same smiles and meaningless promises in Pashto that even Steve has memorized by now — until they do. There’s a massive gathering of Taliban in the next valley, they hear, and there is going to be a push before the winter slowdown comes. Steve pushes his intel up his pipeline like he’s supposed to and his men hope they’ll get in on the action, but they don’t hear anything. 

Three weeks later, they hear that there’s action in the next valley and they’re going in as reserves. They get there and it’s much bigger than they realized, than Higher maybe realized  because things have already gone pear-shaped. There are joint Afghan-Coalition units (because it’s good politics and because Karzai is complaining out loud about the US colonizing his country again) and Special Operations units and regular grunts like Steve and his men and more than one reference to Operation Anaconda, which is never good. Steve’s coming out of a briefing when he thinks he hears Bucky’s name and chases down the bearded guy who said it, who turns out to be Jacques Dernier, a French operator who has heard of Steve, which is the only reason he tells him that Bucky is deep in the fight, trying to shepherd one of the Afghan units. The unit, of dubious loyalty to start with, shatters under pressure and it’s unclear if they failed to engage, engaged badly, or simply turned sides, but three days later, Staff Sergeant Barnes is listed as missing, presumably to be changed to KIA once they find a body because two of the Afghani soldiers from that unit have been found — detained — and they give conflicting reports about what happened to him and the other US soldiers with him. 

Steve’s not allowed to ask questions, at least of his own command, but he does ask Peggy, who cocks an eyebrow but says nothing. Five days later, Steve’s platoon is given orders to search a quartet of compounds at the far end of the valley, the first action they’ve seen since arriving, and Steve doesn’t think it’s a coincidence. He tries to ditch his platoon’s embed, a freelance photojournalist (“You’re not even getting paid for this? You’re doing it on _spec_?”) named Peter Parker, who won’t even think of not going, and off they go in the dark of night, going house to house, room to room. The first two are dry holes and all they end up doing is scaring the kids and pissing off the men by forcing their women into public spaces. The third is a fight and they take casualties but cause more, but they come away with prisoners and electronics, including laptops and a videocamera that’s got American soldiers being taunted with guns in their faces on the memory card, which is enough to hood and cuff every male over puberty. The fourth compound is where things go extreme, there’s an RPG launched at them almost as soon as they breach the outer wall, and things get chaotic. This isn’t Steve’s first fight, but it’s loud and they’re badly outnumbered and it takes effort to force himself to focus on his men and not on his anger or that Bucky might be one of the men on that video. They find two other Americans and a Brit first, chained and hooded and bloodied and dehydrated and Steve’s RTO is already calling in the 9-line for a medevac and Steve asks where Bucky is and one of the Americans says that Bucky made their captors take him first. Steve knows he should be holding the fort and giving orders and being the commander he’s supposed to be, but Bucky — or what’s left of Bucky — is _here_. His platoon sergeant grabs three of their guys and tells them to go follow the LT and Steve is off. They find Bucky alive but barely, clearly prepared for a video execution. Bucky’s too far gone to realize it’s Steve — or, rather, to realize he’s not imagining Steve, which is what he thinks he’s doing. Bucky’s brought to his buddies and Steve stays with them — directing his men in securing the perimeter, like he’s supposed to — until the PJ’s show up. Sam Wilson is one of them, although that means nothing at the time.

Bucky’s evacuated to Germany and then back to the States, so he and Steve don’t see each other until Steve gets leave and goes to Nebraska, where Bucky is convalescing with Rebecca and her young family. Bucky reacts predictably badly to Steve enlisting, but also says that he’s not returning to Big Army just to hang out with him, so Steve says he’ll just have to move over to SOCOM. It takes months because the next testing cycle isn’t right away and that takes a while, but he makes it in and then someone must have pulled strings for Steve to get assigned to the same unit as Bucky and his buddies Morita, Dugan, and Jones. Steve’s not their commander, at least not initially, but as soon as their commander does get promoted out of the job, it becomes Steve’s. 

**Author's Note:**

> I post crazy things like this (and a lot of random stuff) at [Tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/).


End file.
